Two rounds of talks had taken place before the invasion: Gutmann [French mediator] produced an Agreement on Principles, which Eritrea and Yemen signed on 21 May.

The renewed threat of conflict prompted Eritrea, at the end of August, to begin deploying along its coastline Russian-made SAM missiles acquired from Ethiopia.On 22 November 1995, Yemen's Foreign Minister Adb al-Karim al-Iryani met in San'a' with three Eritrean officials to discuss the problem.

Eritrean officials thought that the construction work on Greater Hanish was an attempt to establish facts on the ground before the negotiations scheduled for February started.

[12] Sources close to the office of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh claimed that "several Israelis" had directed the operation, including a lieutenant-colonel named Michael Duma.

[13] According to Steven Carol, in light of Yemeni military humiliation in the battle for Great Hanish island, the allegation of Israeli involvement may have been nothing more than an attempt of Yemen to "save some face".

[13] In 1996, Brian Whitaker (1996) and Carol (2012) suggest that apart from the overt casus belli (that the war was initiated to establish facts on the ground), three other reasons had been proposed for the attack by the Eritreans on the island.

Yemen's military claim, that it had intercepted radio messages in Hebrew and that "several Israelis" had helped to direct the Eritrean operation, led the Arab League to suggest that the real motive for the attack was that Israel intended to set up a base on the island.

[10][13] As no resolution to the problem could be reached in bilateral talks, the status of the archipelago was placed in front of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in the Netherlands.